A Prophet-5 was used in the creation of the lightcycle, recognizer and tank sound effects.Added by Mr. SinistarCool. I want to discuss about how you created some of the sound effects. I remember you were telling me earlier that the lightcycle was created by using a Prophet-5 synthesizer. What it just a Prophet-5 or was it motorcycle sounds mixed in with the Prophet-5?
Yeah, it was a combination of Prophet-5, Minimoog, and then motorcycles that I recorded out in the field with Mike Fremer. We went out to this place called, "The Rock Store", it's like the only place in Southern California where you can come and race in motorcycle racing, because it's so far out there in the middle of nowhere, and hard to get to that the only way they can catch people is by helicopter. So, they leave everybody alone out there and these guys go out there by the hundreds and race. We got these guys to come and do some incredible stuff for us. You know, all of their "crotch rockets" and racing through the hills and then we were able to mount the microphones onto the motorcycles and have them drive around and Michael Fremer had this interesting Saab Sonnet 4-cylinder sports car and we put microphones inside the engine and went, you know, that same day, went riding around with his car and we ended up using a lot of that as well. Oh, okay. So, it's a whole combination of stuff.
Oh yeah, and every time they turned corners, we took a skill saw, you know, when you're cutting through a 2 x 4 and then you stop it and it goes, "Ka-whinggggg!". If you ever doing any sawing, you'll get like a "wooo-kingggg" and it leaves like a little ring.
A Fairlight CMI sampler (the very first digital sampler ever made) was used as well.Added by Mr. Sinistar

I remember listening to the 5.1 surround sound and I heard saws in the interiors shots, when they're showing Jeff Bridges or Bruce Boxleitner in the lightcycle, I can heard sawblades running in the left and right channels.
Yeah, and then when they go into the maze, there's all kinds of backwards cymbals that I recorded because the hit gives you like a suction, so when you turn things backwards it creates this whole kind of feel. So I used backwards cymbal hits for all those different corner turns through the maze. How did you make the sound of the recognizers?
That was a program I created on the Prophet-5. It was kinda derived from a helicopter preset that was one of the original presets in the Prophet-5 and then I modified it and came up with the recognizer sound. Awesome!
I performed it by pitch wheel and modulation wheel right down to 24-track, so all of the Doppler effects and everything I did electronically. Wow, that must have been really hard.
Yeah, back then it was very, very hard because it was me, I was the only guy in the studio most of the time. So, I was the engineer and I was the creator. It was kinda intimate and cool because there wasn't anybody around, so if I made a mistake it was like, "Oh, I'll just do that again." I did the lightcycle sequence like 3 demos before we finally finished it. I knew it so well that I could just sit there, I knew every turn and every corner and I just perform it on the Prophet, just like I was really in the race. Yeah, it was a lot of fun. If I had to pick two of my favorite sounds from Tron, it would have to be the recognizer and the lightcycle because they're so memorable, in my opinion. I always wondered if the recognizer was a synthesizer or just a processed sound. I remember reading that you recorded the Goodyear Blimp and I thought that blimp was the genesis for the recognizer sound.That was for Sark's Carrier. Oh, okay.
That was all done with the Goodyear Blimp over Long Beach. Was the Bit's voice created by using a vocoder?
Yes, it was a vocoder and...I think the voice was me. I think that was me, because they didn't have anybody to do it and all it was was "Yes", "No, no, no, no, no", so I said it into the mic and that's what we ended up using. Was the vocoder like part of a synthesizer or was it just a dedicated vocoder?
It was a Roland vocoder back then. How did you create the derezz sound?
That was created by running a microphone through a pitch to voltage converter which triggered all of my Minimoog sounds and I set it back kinda like how Jimi Hendrix would feedback a guitar through the speakers and what it did was created feedback through the microphone and then triggered the synthesizer with the feedback and I sat there and I watched the picture and I would manipulate the microphone, shake it around and stuff in my hand and everything, right next to the speaker and that's how I created the derezz effects. Wow, that's awesome!
Yeah, that was a pretty complicated setup and no one will ever do it like that again, probably. That what was so cool, because I would watch it and go "Da-da-da-da-da" by stuttering the mic between my fingers, I was able that little "shimmering" effect. Is it true that almost all of the dialogue in the computer world was recorded in ADR?
Yes it was. We had all the actors come back for what's called a "loop group" session. And we had the loop group wrote lines that corresponded with all the different sort of backgrounds, like when they were in the holding pins and it sounded like a prison, that's where we did that. There's was games going off in the distance, so we wanted to create another world of things going on... games being played in different sectors of the computer. Right. I like listening to TRON in surround sound because you can really hear the background voices. One of my favorite lines that can be heard in the background is, "I pleaded temporary short circuitry". (laughs) It's kinda nerdy stuff but it's still pretty amusing.Fantastic line. Yeah, it's real nerdy stuff, and that movie sounded incredible in surround. To this day, it holds up. It really does sound fantastic. TRON is the movie that got me interested in sound effects and made me want to pursue a career in sound.
You know, that's interesting that you say that. The director that I'm working with right now, Brett Leonard, he did Lawnmower Man which I kinda feel is the TRON of the 90's. And then he did Virtuosity with Denzel Washington and we're doing work right now. Back when I did TRON, he was like 17 years old and he was an usher at the Mann Theater in Westwood and one of the movies that he loved, probably because it saw it a million times was TRON. He said, "God, when I do my first movie, I'm going to get the guy who did the sounds for TRON and then when he did his first movie, he called me up and I did the sound for Lawnmower Man. How did you make the sound effects for the disc flying through the air?
That was a combination of a monkey scream backwards processed through a flanger and it was also another one of those weird synthesizer effects that I was able to create through the modulator and also I took a big wire cable spin and that was the whooshing element. The monkey was kinda like the element that was suppose to come around your head because we were doing a lot of surround effects with that disk throw stuff and we wanted it to be kinda like something that flew around your head and really scare you, you know, monkeys are kinda freaky sounding. So, I turned it backwards and you couldn't recognize that it was a monkey scream really. I affect the pitch the little bit, you know, what I like to do was back then I was using 1/4" tape recorders so I able to create really interesting elements by just turning the speed up and down on the tape recorder. That's the thing, a lot of the new digital work stations don't get you the sort of controllers and things we had back then to create special sound effects. They don't exist in the digital world right now. I'm creating a plug-in called the "Serafine FX Tron" from Sonic Reality and it's going to be a plug-in that you can play either through Pro Tools, Logic or Soundtrack Pro and you'll have all the fun stuff that we had back then: turning the sound backwards, affecting the pitch, manipulating all the elements and having a really strong search database engine to find all the effects in the library quickly and then you'll be able to perform on a keyboard, the same way I did it in TRON. We're developing that right now because it doesn't exist and it's very hard for people, they just basically take sounds out of a library and stick it into Pro Tools and that's it. How was the voice of the MCP created?
It was processed through an Eventide Harmonizer and I able to lower his voice down like almost an octave, to make him sound like God, you know? And then, we had the Lexicon 224 Reverbs and that's how we created the massive "canyon-effect" that he was in. It was real heavy processing on the stage and they had him going through all 6 channels and it was a custom patch that I did, in order to get that big deep sound. And I was the one that had the Harmonizer. Now, every body's got one, but back then they were so expensive that the mixing stage didn't have one, so any time they wanted to do special effects on the dub stage they called me in and I did all the processing on the stage. Like for instance, all the footsteps, you know like how it sounded when they walked, like a flanging kinda delay. It was a sneaker on cement with processing and that's what we basically came up with and that was used on the dub stage when we did our pre-dubs. We went and we processed all of the footsteps in a way that we all decided that was the best sound for the world and then I did all that processing on those foley effects. How was the sound for the tank was created?
The tank, again, was my Prophet-5 and I just basically performed them like I did the lightcycles. I came up with a really cool, buzzy electronicy, "tanky" effect and then I created a bunch of them because every tank had to have a different sound. I had to go through and create different sounding tanks every time they started up so it didn't sound like a clone. It was a lot of design work on a lot of those tanks. As they lit up and everything, that was a special effect that I created using Minimoog stuff, you know, like a flash element like a pink noise flash through a flanger. I noticed that in TRON, like on the aircraft carrier bridge and when Clu is being tortured you can heard Pac-Man in the background. What that sound added deliberately as an Easter Egg?
I did that because that was the period. Pac-Man was like the #1 game when that came out. Apple came down and Atari came down and they brought their computers and we sat in my studio for days just creating video game sounds off of the chips that were on the computers, with their top engineers helping us out. We were using the Apple IIe and creating sound effects on the Atari POKEY chip and we had two of their top engineers come down and just help me work with creating vidoe game sounds from these chips. Apple weren't as big in games, they were going to become a business computer, but there were somethings that they had a sound card and they were making wild-sounding video game effects and we did a lot of them with the Apple guys. Do you have a favorite sound effect from TRON?
Well, um, yeah, I do and I kinda use it as a little trademark and when people hear it, they know exactly what it is. It's the gridbug. (laughs)
That was actually the POKEY chip. You know, it's that little "blip-blip". It's such a little comedy effect and it's so effective. Did you use the gridbug effect in any other projects?
I'm just using it right now. I've seen it, because it's in my library, I've seen it all over the place. I'm using it in this thing I'm working on right now which is called, Alex Truth, it's 30 webisodes for this new rock artist. EMI is the label and there's this TRON-kinda opening that they did. Brett Leonard is directing it, so it's the guy that I did Lawnmower Man with. It's like a minute opening of just like crazy, wild technology stuff so I went nuts with the sound effects editing. There's a little effect, kind of a signature right as they're coming through this tunnel, that I used the gridbug effect there and a friend of mine said, "Oh, it's a TRON sound!" He knew it right away, so kinda like one of the most identifiable sound, I think. The sound of a gridbug was created by an Atari POKEY chip.Added by Mr. SinistarIt's almost like your Wilhelm Scream.
Exactly, you hear that sound and it's like "whoa" or you hear your ringtone, you know you can hear it out of a crowd of people. My last question is, do you know if you'll be working on the sequel to TRON?
I've seen some cuts that they've done. Somebody sent me something online and I'm hearing all of my sound effects in the cuts that they've done, so I know they're using my sound effects. They're doing it up at Skywalker Sound and they haven't asked me. I think Skywalker will probably take a lot of my original elements and incorporate them into the new film and probably do the film up there at Skywalker. I think that's what's going on. Well, that about does it. Thank very, very much. This was a really awesome opportunity. I had a great time.
Great, Max. Nice talking with you, man.

Prophet 5 - Revision 3.2
The revision 3.2 was created to interface with the Sequential Circuits Model 1005 Polyphonic

Sequencer and Model 1001 Remote Keyboard/Controller. In order to arrange the interface,

the operating system was again expanded and communication circuitry added. Changes were

also made to the Common Analog circuitry to accommodate PITCH and MOD CV inputs.